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Offline ElPolloDiabl

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #14 on: September 06, 2010, 02:29:34 AM »
You remember carrying a laptop would leave you in a sweat.
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Offline Franko

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #15 on: September 06, 2010, 09:30:12 AM »
When you can't recall or work out what age you were Commodore bit the dust... :confused:
 

Offline Akiko

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #16 on: September 06, 2010, 10:00:39 AM »
I was 13 when Commodore went bust, hard to forget really as was same year, month my Granda died.

I realize am getting old when my niece keeps referring to my youth as the "olden days" !
« Last Edit: September 06, 2010, 10:22:28 AM by Akiko »
 

Offline fishy_fiz

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #17 on: September 06, 2010, 12:40:25 PM »
I went back to uni last year/this year to study and some of the remeniscing other students did made me feel old. They'd talk all nostalgic, laughing at how low spec thier earliest machines where, and to me the systems they mentioned seemed more new than old. Talk of things like nintendo64 and playstations as though they where relics, and laughing at the fact they used things like p3's @ only 500mhz with only 128 meg ram, 8 meg voodoo3 cards and so on.... what I found strange though was when I mentioned the specs of my earliest computers (tandy coco1, 0.8mhz/16KB ram and so on) they'd just look at me blankly, not being able to comprehend and assuming I was making it up 'cos computers where obviously never that slow/low spec and so on :) They actually wouldnt believe me that the Amiga had a 7mhz cpu and typically only 1/2-1 Meg RAM.
Near as I can tell this is where I write something under the guise of being innocuous, but really its a pot shot at another persons/peoples choice of Amiga based systems. Unfortunately only I cant see how transparent and petty it makes me look.
 

Offline dougal

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #18 on: September 06, 2010, 01:21:16 PM »
When i look back and still see the A600 and the A1200 as modern and new.

I was 11 when i got my A500Plus and i remember having total hatred towards the A600 because barely 6 months after i got my A500Plus i saw an article on Amiga Format saying that the A500/Plus is dead and the A600 will replace it.
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Offline Fats

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #19 on: September 06, 2010, 06:59:22 PM »
(Sorry misvoted. -1 >30; +1 16-25.)

... when your hair is graying faster than your amiga is yellowing.

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Offline johnklos

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #20 on: September 06, 2010, 08:31:47 PM »
I'd say I'm middle of the road when it comes to age, but at least I knew what the computing world was doing at every age. Sometimes I talk to people older than me who have no clue about computing history, and while I do understand that it's not everyone's thing, there's so much in that history which can inform people today.

I started with the Sinclair ZX80 - 3.25 MHz, 1K of RAM, upper-case black and white 32x24 display, no floating point, and no ability to see what was on the display while the computer was running.

Going from that to a ZX81 / Timex Sinclair 1000 (they were the same except the ZX81 came with 1K and the TS/1000 came with 2K) was a dream - I had floating point with a rather excellent range of mathematical functions (Sinclair employed mathematicians to help write their BASIC, which was an excellent idea - Sinclair's BASIC kicked Microsoft BASIC's inconsistent ass), SLOW mode so I could see what was on the screen while the program ran, and a better design that made it easy to upgrade the system internally to 8K of RAM because the 16K RAM pack was prone to causing crashes if you moved the system.

This naturally led to the Amiga because Sinclair came out with the QL, which was neat - it had a 7.5 MHz m68008 processor (8 bit external bus version of the m68000), preemptive multitasking, bitmapped graphics, device abstraction, structured BASIC, and some halfway decent software which came with it. It was a poor person's machine for getting into the Amiga strata. Later, when Amigas were cheaper, I naturally got one.

The 1980s were significant for computing because it brought us from the tiny 8 bit worlds (CP/M, Apple, Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, PC-DOS, et cetera) through to the arbitrarily large 32 bit world. Learning about how each of the separate 8 bit worlds lived or died presents important lessons about growth and death - after all, everything nowadays is either some form of (free)Unix, Windows, or small.

This matters today because even the Amiga world, which is small, still exists and this is partly because of a very smart decision at the beginning to encourage people to write software for it. It was truly a programmer's machine. The fact that it's not too hard to port software from (free)Unix certainly helps.

People who don't understand the Amiga are usually people who don't remember history.
 

Offline Zac67

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #21 on: September 06, 2010, 09:38:01 PM »
And you know you're getting old when...

... you try to explain to a young colleague how math works on a 6502:
 "You've got one all-purpose register, two index registers, an ADD and a SUB command - all 8 bit and integer only, of course."
 "And you could actually do calculations with THAT? Where's the FPU???" :lol:
 

guest7146

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #22 on: September 06, 2010, 10:19:31 PM »
Quote from: Fats;578081
... when your hair is graying faster than your amiga is yellowing.


:roflmao:

My hair's staying nice and dark, no grey for me, but unfortunately it's all falling out!!!

AH.
 

Offline Karlos

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #23 on: September 06, 2010, 10:39:10 PM »
Quote from: JimS;577963
...and memory was a pile of wires strung through a bigger pile of little iron donuts.


Good old core memory, AKA LOLRAM (Little Old Lady Random, not Laugh Out Loud). You know, it wasn't particularly slow, either.
int p; // A
 

Offline redrumloa

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #24 on: September 06, 2010, 11:46:58 PM »
You know you've gotten old when...  

Gee, where to start?

2 of my children were born after Commodore's demise. My favorite computer (c64 - 1982) was released almost exactly 1 decade before my first child was born.

Then there is the whole gray hair thing, the shoddy memory thing.
Someone has to state the obvious and that someone is me!
 

Offline JimS

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #25 on: September 07, 2010, 01:31:19 AM »
Quote from: Karlos;578114
Good old core memory, AKA LOLRAM (Little Old Lady Random, not Laugh Out Loud). You know, it wasn't particularly slow, either.


I actually installed a machine like that back When Dinosaurs Walked the Earth (tm) . The B6700 mainframe used magnetic core memory. A whopping 6MB... It came as modules of 32k x 20bits. Two boards sandwiched together - like the A1000 & WCS daughterboard on steroids. One had the memory cores and the other the electronics. All for the low low price of $32,000. ;-) I managed to repair one in the field, but they didn't approve of it. Fun Stuff..
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Offline amiga92570

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #26 on: September 07, 2010, 01:52:57 AM »
Quote from: Zac67;578106
And you know you're getting old when...

... you try to explain to a young colleague how math works on a 6502:
 "You've got one all-purpose register, two index registers, an ADD and a SUB command - all 8 bit and integer only, of course."
 "And you could actually do calculations with THAT? Where's the FPU???" :lol:


6502? My son asked me several years ago what computer I used when I was in College. He looked amused when I pointed to my head. haha

There were calculators, very expensive and not allowed. Slide rule was allowed.
« Last Edit: September 07, 2010, 02:00:00 AM by amiga92570 »
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guest7146

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #27 on: September 07, 2010, 07:28:30 PM »
Quote from: amiga92570;578136
6502? My son asked me several years ago what computer I used when I was in College. He looked amused when I pointed to my head. haha

There were calculators, very expensive and not allowed. Slide rule was allowed.

Actually, I think there's a lot to be said for banning calculators in the class room.  When I was a kid calculators were plentiful, and we were allowed to use them even in Junior school.  We had to learn our times tables and stuff like that, but all our basic maths work was done using the calculator.

As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful.  I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it.  I think that's a bad thing.

AH.
 

Offline Nostalgiac

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #28 on: September 07, 2010, 09:14:11 PM »
Quote from: AppleHammer;578233
Actually, I think there's a lot to be said for banning calculators in the class room.  When I was a kid calculators were plentiful, and we were allowed to use them even in Junior school.  We had to learn our times tables and stuff like that, but all our basic maths work was done using the calculator.

As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful.  I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it.  I think that's a bad thing.

AH.


fully agree - kids today working in my local supermarket or newsagent can't add 1+1 in their heads anymore :(
(yap.. I'm old... I can still do mental arithmetics)

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Offline Zac67

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Re: You know you've gotten old when...
« Reply #29 from previous page: September 07, 2010, 09:21:47 PM »
Quote from: AppleHammer;578233
As a result, my mental arithmetic skills are absolutely dreadful.  I can do maths, even quite complex maths, but if you ask me to do anything without a calculator... forget it.  I think that's a bad thing.


Absolutely. I think the kids need to be able to do the calculations in the head first. Only then can they be allowed to use machines.

I'm glad my old math teacher forbade calculators in lower classes, I think we were allowed from 9th grade on.
You need to be able to 'feel' if the results you get are realistic - many times my head's faster than a colleague of mine with Win calc and 50% of the times he's even wrong. :lol: